Beijing and the Nobel Ceremony

At 1 P.M. in Oslo—8 P.M. in Beijing—China did not watch the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. The event didn’t appear on Chinese television, and, in scattered homes and hotels that receive foreign networks, many screens went dark at the mention of the prize and its winner, Liu Xiaobo, who is serving eleven years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power.”

The Nobel Web site was blocked, but still visible through a proxy server, offering a view of the empty blue chair on stage, a reminder that not only was Liu prevented from attending, but so were his relatives, friends, and lawyers—the first time that has happened since 1935, when Hitler prevented anyone from Germany from receiving the prize on behalf of Carl von Ossietzky, who was in a guarded hospital bed after having been in a concentration camp.

But most Chinese don’t have proxy servers. If they’d had a chance to tune in, they might have heard the unflattering comparison between China, Burma, Iran, and the Soviet Union. They would have heard Thorbjørn Jagland, chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, quote Liu’s own words, that political reforms should “be gradual, peaceful, orderly and controlled.” And they would have seen a standing ovation for the closing exhortation: “We congratulate Liu Xiaobo on the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010. His views will in the long run strengthen China. We extend to him and to China our very best wishes for the years ahead.”

The black screen is a darkly comic relic, a strategy as musty as the Cold War-era paraphernalia that sells at Chinese flea markets these days, left over from a time when Chinese newspapers hailed bumper harvests and denounced foreign imperialists. The black screen is reserved for special occasions—not for the ordinary censorship of news about Chinese-government corruption. The black screen is reserved for a specific kind of unknowing: the denial of something that everyone already knows.

In this case, more than two months have passed since the Nobel committee made worldwide headlines with news of the prize for Liu, a former college professor and literary critic, “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights.” And China has already provided its side of the story, filling its own newspapers with an official portrait of Liu as a criminal determined to “destroy the progress of Chinese society and the welfare of the Chinese people.”

Chinese newspapers on the morning of the Peace Prize ceremony told their readers, as The Global Times put it, that “Oslo Today Resembles the Home of a Cult.” The awards ceremony, it said, “will be not the end but the beginning of another judgment: history’s judgment of the Nobel Prize committee.” At the very moment that China was blacking out the ceremony, the paper was casting the ceremony as a referendum on civilization. “The split of opinion over the Nobel Peace Prize this year is a choosing of sides,” as the Global Times put it on its front page. “The world has been getting flat, but Western spiritual aristocrats are deliberately building a fence to encircle a preserve of the Western ideological world.”

It was, indeed, a choosing of sides: After China threatened countries who planned to attend the ceremony, forty-six embassies said they would attend anyway. Two did not reply (Algeria and Sri Lanka) and fifteen declined: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Egypt, Sudan, Cuba, and Morocco. (Some news reports put the number at nineteen.) As for the choosing of sides inside China, the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees gathered reports of at least twenty activists arrested or detained, and more than a hundred and twenty other cases of house arrests, travel restrictions, forced relocations, and other tactics. Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, remained locked up in their apartment, and, on Friday, police added blue metal construction barriers around it to prevent photographers from filming—the real-world answer to the black screen.

More striking, however, was what China wanted the world to know. The China Daily—the English-language paper that is read almost exclusively by foreigners—ran a three-column headline on page one with the news that “’Most Nations’ Oppose Peace Prize to Liu.”

Few people in China have thought as much about the power of deception as Liu Xiaobo. He once wrote a poem about what he called the “self-invented lie.” When he was denounced as one of the “black hands” behind the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, he chose not to deny it but to revel in it such “that ‘black hand’ becomes a hero’s medal of honor.” He concluded:

Besides a lieI own nothing

I’ve seen versions of the black screen over the years in China, but there is something especially dispiriting about the farce this time. Decades ago, the parallel world in the state-run press was, in its own way, an accurate reflection of China’s delusions. But this time the falsehoods are an end in themselves, self-invented lies dressed up as flamboyant demonstrations of defiance. Chinese leaders know that they are harming their reputation around the world, but they are calculating that the damage is temporary, and that they will ride it out. Perhaps, but the harm is substantial this time. China is not Hitler’s Germany, and now the comparison will endure in history.

But there is a more urgent danger implied by these self-invented lies—the danger that they reflect a weakness in the way that China reaches its most sensitive decisions, an inability to ferret out the most prudent solution to problems. Chinese leaders often invoke the wisdom and moderation of Confucius these days. But Daniel Bell, a Confucian specialist in Beijing, told me today that the Confucian Analects contain advice that might give a Chinese leader pause this week:

If you [the ruler] are right and no one contradicts you, that’s fine; but if you are wrong and no one contradicts you&#8212is that not … leading a state to ruin?

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